Red Eagle and the Wars With the Creek Indians of Alabama.

by George Cary Eggleston

The Holy Ground was a newly-established town, upon a spot chosen by Red Eagle because of its natural strength as a defensive position. It lay upon the eastern bank of the Alabama River, just below what is now Powell's Ferry, in the present Lowndes County, Alabama. The site of the town was a high bluff overlooking the river, and protected on the land side by marshes and deep ravines.

Here Red Eagle had gathered his forces in considerable strength, and hither had fled the remnants of various defeated bodies of Creeks, with their women and children. The prophets Sinquista and Josiah Francis, who were present, declared the soil to be sacred, and assured their comrades that no white troops would be permitted by the Great Spirit to cross the swamps and ravines which surrounded it.

Red Eagle, having more faith in defensive works than in supernatural interferences at the behest of his prophets, whose characters he probably understood pretty accurately, added to the natural strength of the place by picket and log fortifications, making it as difficult to assault successfully as he could.

In this central camp of refuge there were as many as two hundred houses, and during the two or three months which had elapsed since the town was established many of the prisoners taken by the Indians in battle had been brought hither and murdered. When Claiborne advanced to attack the place, preparations were making in the public square for the burning of a number of unfortunate captives, among whom were one white woman, Mrs. Sophia Durant, and several half-breeds.

Claiborne arrived on the 23d of December, and made his dispositions for the assault without delay. He advanced in three columns, leading the centre in person. The Indians, as soon as they learned of Claiborne's approach, made preparations for defence. They carried their women and children across the river and concealed them in the thick woods on the other side.

The savages made the first attack, falling violently upon the right column of Claiborne's force under Colonel Carson. The onset was repulsed after a brief engagement, the Indians becoming panic-stricken for some reason never explained, and retreating. Weatherford led the attack, and for a time contested the field very stubbornly; but his men failing in courage in spite of all that he could do, he was powerless to maintain his ground.

Major Cassels, who with his squadron of cavalry had been ordered to occupy the river bank, failed to do so, and fell back instead upon Carson's regiment; and that gallant officer, seeing the gap thus produced, advanced his line and occupied the ground. Meantime, however, the mischief had been done. Cassels's failure had left a road of escape open to the Indians at the critical moment, and hundreds of them fled and swam the river to the thick woods on the other side.

When the Indian line broke and the retreat began, the nature of the ground, crossed as it was by ravines and dotted with marshes, made any thing like vigorous and systematic pursuit impossible. Perhaps their consciousness that escape by flight was easy helped to induce the Indians to abandon the struggle when they did. However that may be, they fled, and Weatherford could not rally them. Seeing himself left alone, with no followers to maintain the struggle, he was forced to choose between flight and capture. Flight, however, was not now by any means easy. He was mounted upon a superb gray horse which carried him in his flight with the speed of the wind, but he was not long in discovering that Carson had closed the gap through which he had hoped to escape. His enemies were on every side of him but one, and on that side was the high bluff. The story of what he did, as it is commonly told, is a very marvellous one. A bluff about one hundred feet high at the Holy Ground is shown to travellers, who are told that Red Eagle, seeing no other way of escape, boldly dashed spurs into his horse and forced him to make the fearful leap to the river below! As the story is usually told in print it is somewhat less marvellous, but is still sufficiently so to serve the purposes of a popular legend. It is that a ravine passed through the upper part of the bluff, reducing its height to about fifty feet, and that Red Eagle made a leap on his horse from that height. This version of the story is so gravely told in books that are not romances, that the author of the present volume once cited it in print in justification of an incident in a work of fiction, believing at the time that the legend was well authenticated. In examining authorities more carefully, as he was bound to do before writing of the incident in a serious work of this kind, he finds that the leap was much less wonderful than has been represented. Mr. Pickett, in his History of Alabama, gives us the following account, which he assures us he had from Red Eagle's own lips:

"Coursing with great rapidity along the banks of the Alabama, below the town, on a gray steed of unsurpassed strength and fleetness, which he had purchased a short time before the commencement of hostilities of Benjamin Baldwin, late of Macon County, [he] came at length to the termination of a kind of ravine, where there was a perpendicular bluff ten or fifteen feet above the surface of the river. Over this with a mighty bound the horse pitched with the gallant chief, and both went out of sight beneath the waves. Presently they rose again, the rider having hold of the mane with one hand and his rifle firmly grasped in the other. Regaining his saddle, the noble animal swam with him to the Autauga side."

The battle over, Claiborne found his loss to be one man killed and six others wounded. Thirty Indians were found dead on the ground. The number of their wounded is not known. Claiborne destroyed the town, with every thing in it.